The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Fall 2024 were submitted by the course instructors (with the exception of bracketed descriptions “{ }” which are from the course catalog). Specific information regarding the dates, times, and locations of these courses may be found in the Registrar’s official Schedule of Courses for Fall 2024.
1000-Level Courses
PHI 1001 Conflict of Ideas — R. Borges
It’s been suggested that war is the continuation of politics by different means (Carl von Clausewitz). Some took that suggestion to mean that politics was the continuation of war by other means (Lenin). But, if war and politics are simply different ways in which we handle disagreement between people, within nations, and between nations, the analogy seems reasonable. War and politics sit at different ends of the same spectrum – ways in which we disagree. But, if the choice between the conflict of ideas and real conflict is so obvious (politics harm ideas, while wars harm real people), why do real conflicts keep happening? How can we understand what happens when people disagree-especially when they disagree about important or emotionally powerful issues? How can we resolve our disagreements in a principled fashion? Since the issues are important, we cannot just agree to disagree: we must learn how to have a fair fight. But how do we fight fair on the battleground of ideas?
The focus of the course will be on the conflict of ideas, and on how students can make a positive and lasting impact on the conflicts they will encounter in their own lives. To that end, students will learn about multiple aspects of intellectual conflict: psychological aspects of conflict that stand in the way of conscientious dialogue, questions about rhetoric and its role in manipulation, facing and working with our own cognitive limitations, and structuring debate and dialogue in a way that should help us make progress without simply compromising for the sake of peace. They will also practice and witness intellectual disagreements as they debate their fellow students and observe others engage in intellectual disagreement. In virtue of the complexity of the social phenomenon that is intellectual disagreement, students will be exposed to readings in multiple disciplines. Those include the disciplines of economics, statistics, history, feminist ethics, psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, biology, and theology (see schedule for details). Assignments include short argumentative essays, reports on observed conflicts, and practicing and evaluating in-class debates.
PHI 1322 The Idea of Happiness — N. Rothschild
Every person wants to live well. What is it, though, to live well? What sorts of things make our lives good? These, and related questions were fundamental to philosophy at its inception. Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life is not worth living, thereby calling attention to the need to think seriously about fundamental matters of value in order to live a genuinely worthwhile life. Nor has there ever been a time when philosophy, art, literature, history—or any other form of human culture—has not been guided by the question of how we ought to live in order to attain genuine happiness.
This Quest 1 course addresses that question which we cannot help but ask ourselves, “How should I live?” Drawing primarily on the disciplines of Philosophy and Classics, in conjunction with close analysis of works of literature, drama, and film, this course will expose students to both historical and contemporary perspectives on well-being and happiness. The readings have been selected to represent a number of distinct perspectives, both philosophical and non-philosophical, and to help students think for themselves about the kind of lives they want to live. Many texts will be historical, and students will be encouraged to find in these texts material relevant to their own lives, not despite, but because of the fundamentally different assumptions and commitments that animate views which are up to thousands of years old.
PHI 1643 Cultural Animals — J. Rick
Humans are cultural animals. On the one hand, we are biologically evolved animals – members of nature’s kingdom, bound by its universal laws or norms. On the other hand, we are creatures of culture, variably shaped by the influences and innovations of our particular societies and communities. Given our dual citizenship within these domains, questions and challenges emerge regarding the boundaries and allegiances between human nature and human culture. These limits are especially urgent with respect to understanding the contours and content of morality. In Cultural Animals, we will examine the interplay between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ aspects of our lives, with particular emphasis on exploring how these often-coordinating, yet potentially-competing, forces serve to shape our moral practices both within the human community and beyond the human community – specifically with respect to our interactions with and treatment of nonhuman animals.
2000-Level Courses
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — B. Beddor
This course will introduce students to some of the major questions in philosophy. Topics include:
- Can we use philosophical arguments to prove or disprove the existence of God?
- How can we know anything about the world around us? Can we rule out the possibility that we are currently dreaming, or that we are caught in a computer simulation (as in The Matrix)?
- We often take for granted that have free will. But what is free will, exactly? Is it
compatible with the idea that all our actions are determined by physical processes? - Will you be the same person in twenty years’ time? Is it possible for you to survive memory loss or death?
- What are our ethical obligations to other people and the world around us?
- What is the meaning of life? (And what does this question even mean?)
While we will be reading many major philosophers’ attempts to tackle these questions, throughout this course the emphasis will be on you: the goal is for each of you to wrestle with these questions and develop what you take to be the most cogent, well-supported answers.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — R. Borges
{Variable topics introduction to philosophy through study of traditional questions about the existence of God, the nature of the mind, the definition of good, freedom of the will, and criteria of truth and knowledge.}
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — L. Grant
Does God exist? Do we have free will? Is eating meat morally wrong? How do you know that you’re not dreaming right now? Could you survive the death of your body?
This course will introduce you to the kinds of questions philosophers think about and the tools they use to answer them. It will also help you develop a variety of useful skills, such as writing clearly and persuasively, constructing and evaluating arguments, and breaking down complex ideas to make them easier to understand. Readings will include both historical and contemporary texts.
The course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (4000 words).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — A. Ross
In this class we will explore several fundamental philosophical questions that are at the core of our lived experience:
- What makes life meaningful, and how can life be meaningful in even in times when there seems to be no progress and no purpose?
- Is free will real, or only an illusion? Moral responsibility? Merit?
- What makes you you? How do you remain the same person from birth until death though every cell of your body will have been replaced several times throughout your life?
- Is free speech valuable for its own sake? Can the value of free speech be outweighed be outweighed by other considerations? If so, what are they?
- In a digital world of bots, deep fakes, and echo chambers, how can we genuinely know that what we see—or read—is true?
- What are rights? What rights do we have, and what justifies these rights? What makes government authority legitimate? What makes any authority legitimate? Why—or under what conditions—are the rules set by an authority justified?
A philosophy course cannot give you the answers to questions like these, but studying philosophy can help us understand why we shouldn’t expect quick and easy answers to such questions. Philosophy helps us see that our world is more complex, nuanced, and uncertain than it may first appear. In this way, it also helps us live authentically—an “examined life”. When we know what we value, when we see ourselves and our world more clearly, we give ourselves a method for making the best decisions we can in an uncertain world. Learning how to approach problems with a philosophical mindset will help you find and ask better questions: ones that can move a conversation, and a society, forward.
This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (4000 words).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — J. Simpson
This course introduces students to philosophy by engaging with various readings and arguments, both classical and contemporary, in the history of philosophy. This course will have a two-part structure. The first part of the course will cover some topics in the philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics, and the three standard normative ethical theories, which are utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, and Aristotelian virtue theory. The second part of the course will cover applied philosophical issues including abortion, meat-eating, the use of autonomous weapons in war, the attention economy, among others.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — J. Wetzel
This course is a general introduction to some of the major questions and methods of the discipline of philosophy. It presumes no background in the discipline. We will be surveying several of the more significant topics in the subfields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Some examples of questions we will be addressing are: What evidence is there for or against the existence of God? How can we be certain that what we take to be the external world actually exists and is at all like what we believe it to be? What can we be said to know and how can we be certain that we actually know it? Is the mind distinct from the brain? What is the self? Do we have free will? What makes an action morally permissible or impermissible? Throughout the course, there will be a heavy emphasis on learning to discuss and write about philosophical issues, so in-class discussion will be an important component, both of student learning and of the grade. Given the centrality of discussion, reading, and writing to the discipline of philosophy in general and this course in particular, a certain amount of class time will be dedicated to learning how to both read and write philosophical works effectively.
Introduction to Philosophy is a Humanities subject area course within the UF General Education Program and also a UF Writing Requirement (WR4) course. A minimum grade of “C” is required for credit toward the Philosophy major or minor, as well as for general education credit.
PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues — A. Pismenny
This course serves as an introduction to philosophical thinking about contemporary moral topics. In addition to briefly exploring frameworks for ethical thinking, we will tackle the following topics: abortion, ethics of technology, and ethics of intimate relationships: sexual, romantic, and friendship. Students should expect several short writing assignments as well as some longer writing assignments in fulfillment of the Gordon Rule requirement (4000 words).
3000-Level Courses
PHH 3100 Ancient Greek Philosophy — J. Robitzsch
In the History of Western Philosophy, antiquity is generally defined as the period that spans from the activity of the first natural philosophers of the early 6th century BCE to the closing of the (Platonic) Academy by Emperor Justinian in 529 CE. This course offers an introduction to the major philosophical questions of this period and the different answers philosophers gave to them, focusing especially on the works of the Plato and Aristotle.
PHH 3100 is required of all Philosophy majors and meets an area requirement for the Philosophy minor. This course is a Humanities (H) subject area course in the UF General Education Program and a General Education Core Course in Humanities. A minimum grade of C is required for credit toward the Philosophy major or minor and for general education credit.
PHH 3400 Modern Philosophy — J. Wetzel
PHI 3400 is meant to introduce students to the several of the central issues and arguments of early modern philosophy, as well as to the art of reasoning well. We will accomplish these goals by a careful reading of some of the most seminal philosophical works of the early modern period. In these works, we will find discussions of ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion.
PHH 3610 Happiness and Well-Being — N. Rothschild
We tend to think that a person’s life goes well if it has meaning. This thought is as common to sophisticated philosophical theorizing, as it is to self-help books and late-night conversations. But what exactly is the thought? In this class, that is what we will try to figure out. We will ask such questions as, what is meaning? Is meaning a distinct kind of value (different, say, from moral value)? Is our desire for meaning destined to be frustrated because, in some sense, we live in a meaningless world? Or what is not quite the same, is meaning a chimera? Pre-modern thinkers, at least, seemed to have gotten along quite well without the concept of meaning? Do they endorse it under another name? Or is what we call ‘meaning’ a confusion and dead letter? Perhaps most importantly, if having, or finding meaning is decisive for whether we live a good life, how and why is that the case?
As this last question makes clear, to make progress understanding meaning one must do so hand in hand with thinking about what it is for a life to go well. As a result, in this class we will look at several theories of happiness and well-being, both to understand them in their own right and in order to give ourselves a framework for thinking about the nature and importance of finding meaning in one’s life.
We will read texts by, Harry Frankfurt, Susan Wolf, Peter Singer, Bernard Williams, Cora Diamond, Aristotle, and others.
PHI 3130 Symbolic Logic — G. Ray
The course is designed to provide the student with a basic working knowledge of first-order logic and semantics, and familiarize him or her with some basic metalogical results. We will cover basic topics in elementary logic including: propositional, quantificational, identity, free, and modal logics, formal semantics, soundness and completeness. We will also formulate the philosophical underpinnings of our subject with special care.
The learning goals for PHI 3130 are broadly spelled out in the relevant section of the Undergraduate Catalog <catalog.ufl.edu/ugrad/current/liberalarts/alc/philosophy.aspx>.
More broadly, in terms of its general educational import: logic — a study and a practice that grew out of ancient philosophy — isolates and systematizes an essential methodology at work in all theoretical disciplines, including philosophy itself, and uncovers a central core of what it is to reason well. The skills of analysis and deduction learned in this course are fundamental to all science and systematic human endeavors generally, and to any pursuit which involves reasoning in any substantial way
PHI 3300 Theory of Knowledge — R. Borges
{Studies the central topics and concepts of the theory of knowledge, including the analysis of the concepts of knowledge, truth, justification, and related concepts, the nature of empirical knowledge, the problem of skepticism, the nature of a priori knowledge, and the structure of the justification of our beliefs.}
PHI 3633 Bioethics — M. Gardner
Bioethics is the study of ethical issues involving the biological and medical sciences. It includes questions about how health care providers ought to treat their patients; how medical researchers ought to set up and carry out their studies; and how everyone ought to treat present and future generations of human and nonhuman life forms. This course will equip you with some of the concepts, skills, and information you will need in order to think critically about these and related questions.
PHI 3650 Moral Philosophy — A. Pismenny
This course provides an introduction to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. It may include some of the following questions:
- Where does morality come from?
- What do we do when we make a moral judgment?
- What should morality be like?
- What does morality do for us?
- Why should we be moral?
In attempting to answer these questions, we will examine and scrutinize various views, theories, and arguments. For instance, we will look at the popular view of Cultural Relativism (“What’s right is whatever my culture says is right”), examine the role of religion in morality (e.g., “What’s right is just what God says is right”), and, most importantly, attempt to understand the role of reason in morality with views like Social Contract Theory, Kantian Ethics, Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, as well as Feminist Ethics and Ethics of Care. We will work with historical as well as contemporary texts and look at the ways in which they do and do not provide systematic procedures for answering questions about right and wrong. In addition, we will discuss a variety of specific moral issues to flesh out some of the issue pertaining to these theories.
PHI 3650 Moral Philosophy — J. Robitzsch
Imagine that a friend calls you. Because you are watching a movie and do not want to be disturbed, you decide not to answer. The next day the friend asks you why you did not answer the phone. Knowing that the friend would be upset that you did not take the call, is it permissible to tell the friend that your phone died? And generally, is it ever permissible to tell a lie? The area of philosophy that deals with this question and others pertaining to right or wrong moral conduct (as well as more broadly how we ought to live our lives) is moral philosophy or ethics. It is the topic of this course that will discuss in detail the three main theories of normative ethics (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics) drawing both on historical and contemporary sources.
PHI 3650 is required of all Philosophy majors and meets an area requirement for the Philosophy minor. This course is a Humanities (H) subject area course in the UF General Education Program and a General Education Core Course in Humanities. A minimum grade of C is required for credit toward the Philosophy major or minor and for general education credit.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — M. Gardner
In this course we will use philosophical methodology to understand various ethical issues at the intersection of technology studies and data science. Some of those issues include the reliance on artificial intelligence to make policing and sentencing decisions in the criminal justice system; mass surveillance and privacy; technological unemployment; and the use of autonomous weapons in war.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — D. Purves
This course exposes students to important interactions between ethics, contemporary data science, and emerging social issues. Students will grapple with foundational concepts in ethics and data science, pairing theoretical discussions of ethics with concrete issues in emerging data-driven technologies. Discussion topics include racial bias in machine learning, the black box problem for machine learning, mass surveillance and privacy, technological unemployment, and autonomous weapons systems.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — A. Ross
This course exposes students to important interactions between ethics, economics, and public policy in assessing the social value of emerging technologies. Students will grapple with foundational concepts in ethics, economics, and policy-making. The course pairs theoretical discussions of the philosophical dimensions of economics and policy-making with concrete issues in emerging technologies. Discussion topics include: cost-benefit analysis, risk, markets and market failures, economic valuations of technology, justice and fairness, and property rights. We will apply these concepts in assessing emerging technologies and technological issues, such as surveillance capitalism and privacy invasion, algorithmic bias, AI-enhanced predictive policing, and geo-engineering, among others.
PHI 3695 Philosophy and Death — D. Purves
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us…since as long as we exist death is not with us but when death comes, then we do not exist. – Epicurus
Starting from the plausible claims that our death does not happen during our lives, and that we cease to exist when we die, Epicurus reaches the unbelievable conclusion that death is something we should not care about. Upon reflection, the reasoning is hard to resist. After all, if death is not bad for us before it happens or after it happens, when could it be bad?
This is just one of the puzzling questions we will confront in this class on philosophy and death. Others include:
- What exactly is death? Under what conditions to individuals die?
- What would it take to survive death? Is survival after death possible?
- If death is bad for the person who dies, should we prefer to be immortal? What would be good (or bad) about immortality?
- What is wrong with killing?
- When, if ever, is it morally okay to kill a human being? Why is it worse to kill a human being than an animal, and what general lesson can that us about the badness of killing?
- We will also consider some controversies about killing, including abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and killing in war.
PHI 3700 Philosophy of Religion — G. Witmer
The philosophy of religion can range over many different areas, including issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Instead of a broad survey, however, in this course we focus on what is arguably the most fundamental question in this area, namely, whether or not God exists. The course is structured around a fictional dialogue between a theist, an atheist, and an agnostic as well as supplementary papers (from a coursepack) that expand on parts of the dialogue. Topics include the relationship between God, value and morality; arguments from design (teleological arguments), including both classical biological and more contemporary “fine-tuning” arguments; cosmological or “first cause” arguments; the infamous ontological argument (which aims to show just from the definition of God that he must exist); the significance of religious experience and claims about miracles; the problem of evil as a reason to be an atheist; the idea that we might ”bet” on God’s existence as per Pascal’s Wager; and the nature of faith. By the end of the course you should have a substantial understanding of the most important lines of argument concerning the existence of God.
Requirements include two argumentative papers, unannounced short tests scattered throughout the semester, and regular writing exercises. There is no mid-term or final exam.
There are two required texts. The first is The God Dialogues by Torin Alter and Robert J. Howell (Oxford University Press, 2011) which will be available at the UF bookstore. The second is a customized coursepack edited by myself and published by Cognella; both print and electronic versions are available, and you will be able to order those through the course’s Canvas site.
PHM 3202 Political Philosophy — J. Rick
In this course, we will examine several of the most enduring and influential texts in the history of Western Political, Social, and Economic Thought: works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. We will also examine contemporary applications of these historical ideas in the work of Carol Pateman and Charles Mills. By focusing on the relationships between rulers and the ruled, between legislation and law abidingness, and between competing and cooperating individuals, our close and critical readings of the arguments made in these historical classics will help us to reflect on topics such as the following: the nature and origin of law, the basis of political authority and legitimacy, the fixity or flexibility of human nature, the nature of economic relations and interpersonal relationships, and the dynamics of social power.
4000-Level Courses
PHI 4220 Philosophy of Language — B. Beddor
Over the last hundred years or so, philosophers and linguists have made great strides in understanding linguistic meaning and communication. This course will provide a broad overview of some of the major developments on this front. We’ll tackle topics such as:
- The Nature of Meaning. Humans have a remarkable ability to invest noises and written marks with meaning. How is this possible? What makes a particular word – say, my use of the word “cats” – mean what it does (namely, cats), rather than something else (e.g., dogs), or, for that matter, nothing at all?
- Demarcating Sense and Nonsense. Some uses of language seem to be altogether meaningless. Can we develop any sort of useful criterion for distinguish meaningful language from meaningless language? If so, can we use it to adjudicate whether various philosophical claims are meaningful?
- The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction. Sometimes we mean something (in a suitably broad sense of meaning) without directly saying it (e.g. sarcasm). What is the relationship between what is said and what is meant but not said?
- Language Acquisition. At any early age, humans acquire the ability to produce and understand a potentially infinite variety of new sentences – that is, sentences they’ve never previously encountered. How is this possible? What’s the best explanation for this extraordinary ability?
- Language and Thought. Does language shape the way we think? If so, in what ways?
PHI 4542 Philosophy of Space and Time — C. Dorst
This course will explore a variety of philosophical questions about the nature of space and time from the perspective of contemporary physics. No prior background with the relevant physical theories will be expected, but students should be prepared to learn some of the fundamentals of these theories as part of the course. Emphasis will be placed on gaining an intuitive understanding of the theories, while requiring only a minimal amount of mathematics.
Our approach to this material will be to focus on the conceptual foundations of physical theories such as Newtonian mechanics, Lagrangian mechanics, Hamiltonian mechanics, Special Relativity, and General Relativity. We will be guided in this regard by Sean Carroll’s The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, which will serve as our textbook for the course. The book aims to explain the conceptual foundations of those physical theories while also exploring some philosophical issues that they give rise to. We will supplement the text with additional, more overtly philosophical readings along the way. These supplemental readings will cover a variety of topics, including: the metaphysics of laws of nature, the metaphysics of time, the nature of instantaneous velocity, conservation laws, the arrow of time, and the implications of Special and General Relativity for some of the foregoing topics.
PHI 4930 Ethics of Identity — A. Pismenny
This course will explore various ethical issues pertaining to our social identities. After examining several accounts of social and political constructionism, we will think about the following questions among others: (1) if gender and race are inherently about domination and subordination, should they be eliminated for the sake of a more egalitarian world? (2) who if anyone should be compensated by reparations for the wrongs of the past?, (3) what if anything is problematic about the ‘person first’ approach when it comes to disability?, (4) what kind of duties do allies have that stem from their allyship?
PHI 4930 Truth — G. Ray
In this course we will explore several strands of the philosophical discourse on truth. What is truth and why does it matter? What philosophical problems concern truth, and what do philosophers say about them?
The notion of truth is thought to be a central semantic aspect of language — a fundamental feature of how language relates to the world we wish to speak of. Yet, there are various challenges to spelling out just what truth comes to.
Things people say, believe and think, sentences on a chalk board, are all sorts of things that are spoken of as true/false. From the very very specific to the most abstract of these can be thought of in terms of truth and falsity. Our reliance on a notion of truth could not be more prevalent or basic.
Yet, there are well-known paradoxes associated with the notion of truth that suggest that we do not well-understand this concept.
In addition, some very common ways we use language present challenges to any account of truth. For example, much of our talk about the world is more or less vague and while this seems perfectly acceptable practice, it is hard to say why some vagaries would be true and others false — without paradox. Much of our talk is also more or less metaphoric and this too creates questions about the role of truth/falsity in language and thought. We even make true/false distinctions when talking about the purely fictional persons and situations presented to us in books and movies and games. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to give a systematic grounding for the distinction we are making.